


A CHRISMAS CAROL - THE MAN WHO WOULD  REMEMBER CHRISTMAS

by LeNoir14



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's, Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V, Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga), Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS, Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal
Genre: A Chrismas Carol Fanfiction, Alternate Universe - College/University, Chrismasfiction, Judai is the ghost of present Christmas, Other, Yugi and Atem are the ghost of past Christmas, Yusaku Fujiki is scrooge, Yusei is the ghost of the future christmas, Yuusaku hate christmas, Yuusaku need a hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:54:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28190493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeNoir14/pseuds/LeNoir14
Summary: - Not deigning more than a glance, he turned his head towards the window, observing the darkness of the sky with a brooding air."Now I have to go, I have other people waiting for me" said the Spirit of the Future Christmas "However I want to warn you of one thing: get ready. I'm not the only one you will see tonight; the Spirit of Present Christmas and Past Christmas will come from you very soon "and concluded, with a crooked smile" Sweet dreams, Yusaku Fujiki " -
Relationships: No Romantic Relationship(s)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	1. PROLOGUE - THE MAN WHO FORGOTTEN CHRISTMAS

Yusaku Fujiki's time was punctuated by the fast ticking rhythm that the keyboard produced under the rapid work of his hands. His eyes were trembling on the screen in a tremor that denounced the fleeting reading dedicated to the screen, his mind mostly focused on where each letter and each number took place under his fingers; he had little time, the boy, and a great deal of work that others, in his place, would gladly delegate to a more fertile period of freedom.  
It was a sudden knock that interrupted the technological idyll into which he had decided to sink. When the work was interrupted, with the thin bar indicating the possibility of entering new codes, Yusaku slowly detached his mind from the digital construction he was making to lend an ear and eyes to one of his roommates - and one of the few friends life had allowed him.  
"Yusaku-san, we're going," were Yuya Sakaki's words, his cheeks congested with cold and his eyes glistening with sleep. That morning, in fact, he had been forced to get up at the crack of dawn because, in his carelessness, he had put off packing his belongings and the amount of gifts to take home until the very last minute - and ended up making the deafening noise of closed suitcases and padded boxes just ten minutes ago.  
Behind him, the young man was not alone. Yuma Tsukumo, in fact, his other roommate and the second friend life had ever allowed him to have, smiled with the optimism that never left him, his eyes bright with imminent joy and his hands wrapped in soft cotton gloves.  
"Are you sure you don't want to come with me to Heartland?" was his question, and it was the umpteenth replay Yusaku attended.  
"Thank you, guys, but I've decided I want to stay here and finish my thesis. If I can finish it by the end of the year, I'll definitely be able to graduate within a very short time."  
"And we know how much you care about punctuality on that scholarship thing, but... It also means you're going to ruin Christmas," Yuya replied. "Are you really, really sure?"  
Yusaku nodded, because he had already known the arguments of his friends in the days before, and he knew that what he was witnessing were only the last attempts driven more by desperation than by the hope of having him as a traveling companion.  
"You don't have to worry about me, I'll be fine."  
The two looked at each other, far from convinced.  
"Well... if you're really going to do this... at least let us..." Yuya began, rushing to his room to get something he had obviously forgotten.  
"...let us give this to you," completing his friend's sentence, in a foresight that had made him active in reflexes that had nothing to do with crazy challenges and insurmountable study obstacles, Yuma's hands went to retrieve - it seemed out of nowhere, as he suddenly appeared - a flashy rectangular package colored in bluish shades.  
"A little thought" Yuya joined in, clutching a small indigo-colored envelope in his hands.  
Yusaku appeared embarrassed by this unusual generosity.  
"Sorry, guys, but... I don't have anything in return," and called himself a fool, for not spending a minute of his time doing something nice for them. A packet of sweets would have been enough - he was talking about two first-class gourmets - and instead he had to look ungrateful.  
Despite everything, however, the two boys laughed heartily.  
"I think I speak for both of them when I say we didn't want a thank you," said Yuma - and Yuya agreed with his partner with an energetic nod of consent.  
"This is a way to show you that even though you're a snoopy, workaholic, computer-obsessed, taciturn most of the time and unable to weave normal civilized conversations..." Yuya began.  
"Uh... aniki, don't you think you're overreacting a bit?" Yuma interrupted him, embarrassed for him.  
"What I'm saying," continued the other, realizing he had to cut short, "is that you're part of our gang, a close friend of ours. And Christmas is the perfect time to prove it."  
"Without all this fuss, I'm with him... so here you go. I confess I had the clerk explain to me what I was buying, but... I hope you like it."  
And both, smiling with thirty-two teeth, put their present on the only furniture in that Spartan room.  
Thanking them from the bottom of his heart - because, beyond the gift, he was really moved by the good they showed him - he mentally promised himself to find, even after Christmas, the time to give them back that declaration of friendship.  
Yusaku Fujiki would never have known Yuya Sakaki and Yuma Tsukumo, if circumstances hadn't created the right dynamics to deepen their knowledge. As Yuya had specified, in fact, he was incapable of weaving normal conversations, he was distrustful of his neighbors, and most of the time he liked to stay for his own. For years he had been considered a misanthrope, according to most people, and he had lived with that word so much that he no longer found it even disparaging. On the contrary, he was now convinced that he was the only one capable of fully expressing his being.  
Originally from Den City, he had packed his bags and guns when a very important scholarship had allowed him to continue his studies at the prestigious University of Miami, heading the faculty of computer engineering. Already very skillful with computers from as long as he could remember, he saw in that occasion the possibility of making his ingenuity flourish without running into the wrong paths; already at the age of sixteen he had risked getting involved in a group of hacktivist anarchists who wanted him at their service, at eighteen he had been forced to enter the school's archive to improve the report card of someone who had promised to pay all his debts for the small favor asked in return. In other words, he had always had one foot in the civilized world and one in the world of lawlessness, and tired of a hovering situation that did not satisfy him, he decided to make use of his only talent in the hope that someone would notice him. And then it happened.  
Den City and Miami were light years away, in the eyes of a boy who didn't even have a driver's license; forced by force majeure to find cheap accommodation, he had to come to terms with the fact that his desire for solitude would never be accepted, especially considering that the higher the number of roommates, the lower the expenses.  
Their cohabitation had not begun immediately; the two of them were a year younger than him, and the young man had spent the beginning of his out-of-town experience with a group of penniless doctors who, unable to cope with the dynamics of a big city, had finally retired elsewhere.  
Yuma Tsukumo had a dream of becoming an archaeologist, just like his father. He saw the pleasure of travel, of discovery, of adventure in that profession; disinterested in the amount of study that awaited him, he had decided to bargain with that mission without regard for its limits - limits that, as Yusaku would later discover, he was still brilliant at overcoming them.  
Yuya Sakaki, on the other hand, had no intention of formalizing himself in a university environment. He had only agreed to enroll in the acting school in Miami because the lessons took place in the wonderful city theater, which had a dizzying capacity for spectators.  
With exceptional talent and one hundred and one percent of his energy spent on what he loved to do the most, Yuya Sakaki was confronted with a serious problem worthy of the sons of art: Yusho Sakaki had been a star in the firmament of Miami, and many believed that his son, by natural laws never written or heard, had to be a faded copy of him. That was why, although Yuya was a native of that city, he had quickly left his nest to seek the right opportunity - the chance to prove that he was not his father, that he had great skills and the desire to show them off.  
In short, if his first roommates had quickly realized that silence and disinterest were the only ways to approach Yusaku, with those two earthquakes, peace itself had taken on a relative concept; unable to live without trouble, unable to express their divergent opinions without screaming, unable to leave the kitchen or the high rooms of the house clean after using them, for Yusaku, at least in the beginning, had begun one of the most exhausting periods of his existence.  
In the beginning, indeed; the time when he found their chattering, their laughter, their exaggerated way of doing things, their inability to mind their own business, irritating, disappeared on the day he was left alone in that apartment again - another holiday that forced them into exaggerated festivities - and discovered that the emptiness was too desolate, the silences too disturbing, and the greys too faded. With dismay, and even a hint of regret, he had realized that he had laughed quietly at their nonsense, that he had been worried when one of them committed a foolish act and withdrew with some bandaged limbs, that he had felt at home when the two of them sat around the table - waiting for him to cook, because he was the only one capable of holding a pan without exploding any of the ingredients that passed through the convent - and they recounted in detail what they had done. It had been such a gradual evolution that he hadn't even grasped it until reality had turned the tables.  
And, since then, despite his feelings and misogyny screamed the opposite, he felt in his heart the desire to be part of those colors, to be part of those stories and no longer to be a spectator of a duo, but to be part of a trio. It was something that the Yusaku Fujiki of the past years would never have dreamed of; perhaps he would even book a place in some isolated clinic, in search of his lost peace of mind. And instead, in the present, he could no longer see evil in the simple company of two exuberant people.  
Perhaps Yuma and Yuya hadn't even noticed his change, or perhaps they had. Yusaku never knew, but their kindness to him certainly didn't diminish for a second.  
On December 24 of this year, with the two of them out again to enjoy the holidays with their families, Yusaku had for a moment feared that the initial situation of claustrophobia threatening to kill him inside a tiny apartment would reappear, undermining all his determination and misanthropy, but the boy knew that, this time, he would have to make a virtue out of necessity.  
The scholarship did exist, of course, but it had deadlines that required students not even to consider the possibility of going off course; so it was a race against time, the one he had to do, and although he felt his brain in pieces and his hands burning, he understood that the only possible alternative was to prepare the last exam and at the same time lay the foundations for the new program that would be the subject of his thesis. In the morning he would devote it to books, in the evening to the binary codes that would allow his comp.  
What he had done on that day also; the clock was already at 10:45 p.m., as he was about to finish one last patch and save all the progress he had made.  
"I think it's time for bed," he said when the programs closed.  
He lay on the stiff mattress he loved so much, under the heavy flannel blankets that his friend Yuya had brought for him directly from his father's house.  
He promised himself to sleep soundly, because the next day would be a hard day.  
He had no idea that the worst was yet to come.


	2. FUTURE – THE MAN WHO HAD FORGOTTEN THE SMILE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I'm the Spirit of Future Christmas," he said, presenting himself with the same solemnity as those who flag for the world to own a multinational corporation at his command. "And you can call me Yusei Fudo.  
> At that point, Yusaku became convinced that his predictions needed to be revised, and that what he was looking at was not only a thief, but also under the influence of drugs. Bad, he said, because with someone who erased rationality with a strip of cocaine, it was difficult to reason.  
> But he thought he'd try anyway. Raising only one arm, because the other was still trying to reach his old cell phone, he tried to talk while keeping calm.  
> "Listen, man, I won't do anything to you," he began. "But listen to me, there's no money here. I assure you that you have chosen the wrong house, because there are only three penniless students here, one poorer than the other" and he did not add that the last one in the chain was him because he did not think it was necessary.  
> "Um... I don't want money," he did, obviously confused. "Sorry, I told you I'm the Spirit of Christmas Future. What makes you think I want to get paid?"

"Wake up"  
A whisper in the black moonless night.  
"I said wake up"  
A pushy whisper, and very touchy too.  
And Yusaku understood that it was more than a dreamy thing when a determined shake went to shake his shoulder. Alarmed, he raised his head, instantly overcoming the dizziness of sleep.  
In front of him, go and see for what absurd and inexplicable reason, stood a totally unknown man, never seen before. And he would have remembered it otherwise, the boy, because that bizarre golden mark across his forehead would have been hard to forget. From the height of meters that Yusaku could not reach, he stared at him with scrutinizing eyes, eyes of a color reminiscent of the sky when the first light of evening began to spread as the sun sank.  
"Who the hell are you?!"  
The boy's first thought, now decidedly alarmed, was that he was looking at some thief expert in intimidation; come to think of it, he could not remember locking the door when he went to sleep, and he was certain that Yuma and Yuya had not done so simply because they were aware of how much their oldest friend hated feeling like a caged rat.   
Having come to terms with claustrophobia when he was seven years old, he realized that only by living with his problem would he survive without dying from it; and when his two roommates had supposedly done Yusaku a favor by making sure of his safety without consulting him, they too had come to terms with it when they found him panting in the lobby of their apartment.  
So, he called himself mentally stupid, letting his hand, seemingly naturally, go under his pillow to pick up the cell phone he had left in the still hot coals. The police number was already set in the speed dial, a few keystrokes and the police would receive a report from him.  
But Yusaku had not yet realized that the night was full of surprises in store for him.  
"I'm the Spirit of Future Christmas," he said, presenting himself with the same solemnity as those who flag for the world to own a multinational corporation at his command. "And you can call me Yusei Fudo.  
At that point, Yusaku became convinced that his predictions needed to be revised, and that what he was looking at was not only a thief, but also under the influence of drugs. Bad, he said, because with someone who erased rationality with a strip of cocaine, it was difficult to reason.  
But he thought he'd try anyway. Raising only one arm, because the other was still trying to reach his old cell phone, he tried to talk while keeping calm.  
"Listen, man, I won't do anything to you," he began. "But listen to me, there's no money here. I assure you that you have chosen the wrong house, because there are only three penniless students here, one poorer than the other" and he did not add that the last one in the chain was him because he did not think it was necessary.  
"Um... I don't want money," he did, obviously confused. "Sorry, I told you I'm the Spirit of Christmas Future. What makes you think I want to get paid?"  
"I don't even have the drugs, if that's what you're looking for!" said Yusaku, and somehow blamed himself for leaking his irritation in his tired tone of voice. His life was hanging by a thread, and he couldn't afford to infuriate him by showing how wrong it was to violate a private home.  
Yusei, meanwhile, passed a hand through his raven-black hair, and a disconsolate tone was painted on his face.  
"Every year the same story," he said to himself, as if "the more you go on, the more skeptics close the door in your face."  
Then she stared at him intensely.  
"Better finish it quickly; I have a lot of things to do tonight."  
Yusaku could not foresee it, but from under the indigo cape, the one worn by the man to hide his whole body, a brown gloved hand came out, which, with violence, anchored itself to the arm still raised. At that point the world lost its colors, new ones were taken and Yusaku fought against a sense of vertigo never felt before.  
"But... ...where are we?"  
Certainly not in his room. There was no asphalt in his room, and as a claustrophobic, he knew of the existence of walls that delimited his living space; instead, in front of him, everything he was able to see was articulated in the many floors of a large company built on the edge of a city he could not define - he did not remember a similar neighborhood in Miami, and certainly did not exist in Den City. He deduced that he was in the suburbs only because the number of human beings living there seemed to be zero.  
"We are in your future, Yusaku Fujiki," Yusei said, leaving him the arm with which she had held him all that time. "And in Los Angeles, to be precise. Nice place, let me add"  
Yusaku was too bewildered to reply. His rationality, that cold logic that always asked physics for explanations to seek clarification, would never accept such a speech as an answer to a sensible question of his. At the same time, however, he realized that one of the proofs required by reason already possessed him, and he found it before his eyes. It was in fact impossible that prestidigitation could perform such a trick, and in any case such a trick would require time, preparation, and studied staging. Not even Yuya Sakaki, with all his talent, would have been able to do it.  
"I'm dreaming," he thought then, of course that was the only way not to go crazy.  
"That's the way it is in a way."  
He had spoken aloud, apparently, because Yusei Fudo had even bothered to answer him.  
"Wait, so I'm in a..."  
"Actually no, but I honestly don't feel like wasting my time explaining it to you. If a rational like you can't accept all this, then you can just believe what you want. The job doesn't change for me anyway."  
And in his quick manner, it was violently clear how little he wanted to do what he was doing. Yusaku, who was more concerned about whatever was going on at the time than he was, wondered why he had become involved in it. Then he remembered that it was a dream, and so he realized that perhaps a meaning was not to be sought.  
In the meantime, Yusei had decided that he was particularly fond of the previous method, allowing him to do his duty - whatever it was - and to use very little effort. So, he took him by the arm again and, in the blink of his eyelids, Yusaku found himself having to deal with a new environment, completely different and opposite to the previous scenario.  
It was an interior, for starters. Illuminated by neon lights that Yusaku found annoying, but which must have been put in for a power saving that maximized profits with the minimum of money. He was disturbed by that thought, so typical of him, which materialized in the figure bent over a sophisticated computer, glasses to help tired eyesight and the first wrinkles of old age to mark his face. Yusaku thought, looking at him, that he looked just like the face of someone who had forgotten how to smile. The worst was to realize it was his own face.  
"We're twenty years in the future," Yusei exclaimed, anticipating his question. "Precisely on the night of December 24."  
Yusaku was astonished, but he also felt a tiredness due to the saturation of novelties: he was tired, tired of being surprised and tired of finding himself in a series of unknowns that were slowly undermining him.  
The appearance of the place he was in was austere, with those large windows overlooking the lights of the city, but it was also sadly aseptic. If Yusaku hadn't seen himself bent over a job that had sucked all his attention, he would never have deduced that he was in his next, dreamlike office. Not even a plaque marked his property, not even a photo. There was just a desk, a computer and lots, lots of silence.  
Silence that was interrupted by a little tap on the door.  
"Forward," he said. She had a much hoarder voice than her youthful version, Yusaku wouldn't even recognize it if... well, if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes.  
He almost seemed to have lost the habit of talking.  
Through the door appeared a man in his thirties, sturdy build and slightly short. His emerald hair was so dull that it looked dark, and in neon light he didn't even have the strength to glow. His round face had obvious signs of tiredness, and his hands passed tiredly over one eye about to close, before he spoke.  
"I've come to tell you we're leaving," the boy said. Yusaku saw on the black jacket he was wearing a plaque, where the name Shima Naoki stood next to a photo of the individual with a slender smile on his face.  
Yusaku, the one from the future, didn't even give him an answer worthy of the name. Perhaps he nodded, but no one could swear to the movement of his face.  
"Um... thank you," added the other, in obvious embarrassment, "for giving us the whole Christmas bridge. On behalf of all..."  
"It was not I who granted it to you, but the law. Thank the ministers, since you are so diligent."  
Forgetting for a moment to be in a dream, Yusaku was dismayed to see himself in such a cynical and indifferent background. He was the first to consider himself a misanthrope, leaving it up to others to believe it, but he never dared to respond with such villainism. Especially if on the other side he saw no hostile intent.  
"I see," Naoki said, evidently upset by such coldness. "So... Merry Christmas... from all of us..."  
He didn't get an answer that time either.  
Yusei didn't bother to warn him that they were about to leave; the young programmer understood him only when he felt an iron grip in his place again, and the change of scenery occurred again, denouncing how Mr. Fudo was as zealous as he was unscrupulous in his work. Yusaku almost fell to the ground for that unexpected change and thanked himself mentally for having remained stable on his legs when he saw filthy asphalt behind him.  
They were in a parking lot; in the background, the same company we saw earlier.  
"Mr. Robot tells us to thank the law for giving us a proper vacation," he suddenly heard.  
It didn't take long, the student, to realize that it was Shima, and that he was talking about him. He should have felt resentment, since he was using an obvious disdain to highlight his person but, in all conscience, he was the first one to be angry with his future self. Such rudeness went beyond any request for silence.  
Naoki went to meet several employees, all of them so different that Yusaku gave up on his features right away. All he saw was the elegance of their outfits that bitterly clashed with the outdated cars they were getting into.  
"That damn bastard" one of them exclaimed, "A good way to tell us that if we weren't right in front of the State, he wouldn't even let us stay home!"  
"I guess we have to thank the State for getting paid as well," said another, near Naoki. "If it were up to him, he wouldn't give us a penny, that lousy wretch."  
Amid laughter and scorned words, Yusaku Fujiki's name was vilified without any demonstration of grace from those present. The words of one were the starting point for another.  
And he, the real Yusaku, the innocent victim of that crossfire against him, did not know how to react. As before in front of the nickname "Mr Robot", he should have felt something that spoke of anger, or at least injustice in seeing that so much courage of words was spent only because he was not present. But in his heart, instead, was the winter of fear: Yusaku was frightened, and the hatred that others threw at him without even a hint of remorse landed on him. It was terrifying to know that he was on top of a glass tower, alone like a dog, while those who said plague and horns about him formed a compact group of men who wished him all the evil humanly possible.  
"Well, I think that's enough."  
And with the usual steel grip, they both went back exactly where they started. The stiff softness of his bed and the blankets still full of its warmth added a patina of unreality to what had just been consumed; if the young man had not previously found the explanation for the dream, he would have been discovered on the threshold of madness.  
"I... what was that?"  
"That was..."  
"I'm not asking you to explain to me again what you mean by the future, but..."  
He didn't even know how to explain it, he didn't know how to formulate in question what gripped his heart. He could have asked "Why am I scared?" but he certainly wouldn't have understood.  
What he didn't know, Yusaku, was that Yusei could understand his every feeling. He was there to answer all his dilemmas.  
"You've always been a materialist, my boy. You weren't obsessed with money, but you knew right away that who has money also has power. That was a lesson you learned when you were a child."  
The student lowered his eyes, hoping that the other would not see the myriad of conflicting emotions that those words had awakened in his soul. It was the cruelty of those who passed salt on a still open wound.  
"That's why, when you had the chance, you used all your knowledge to open the computer company you saw. You began to dedicate yourself more and more to your work, you forgot yourself and your emotions, in the long run you even forgot how to use them. You also lost contact with the only friends you ever had, and you got so used to being alone that you didn't want anyone by your side anymore".  
A face that had forgotten how to smile... that's what he thought of when Yusaku saw him bent over a computer. He had no idea how exact his ideas were.  
However, he didn't feel like accepting all that scenery while remaining impassive. In himself, he sensed the restlessness of a flame that, always forgetting that dreams have no rules, he could in no way accept such a darkening of his soul.  
"But I'm not so... acid! Or rude! I have always respected people."  
"Just because you don't have a prominent position now, and you are surrounded by people to whom you owe obedience and devotion: your university professors, your landlords... you don't know what power is, you haven't yet been fascinated by it. That's why you talk like this."  
Not giving him more than a glance, he turned his head towards the window, looking at the darkness of the sky with a meditative air.  
"Now I have to go, I have other people waiting for me," said the Spirit of Future Christmas. "However, I want to warn you of one thing: be ready. I'm not the only one you'll see tonight; the Spirit of Christmas Present and Christmas Past will come to you very soon," he concluded, with a slanting smile. "Sweet dreams, Yusaku Fujiki.

He reopened his eyes and rediscovered himself panting, his forehead beaded with sweat and his throat dry.  
And he was in his bed, the light in his room was off and, more importantly, he was alone.  
As he must have been on that night before...  
"What do I eat at night to give me such nightmares?" was his first thought.  
Although the question was rhetorical, it was immediately answered: he wasn't eating. And he didn't do it to save money, or to not open the fridge and bother to get into the stove. That evening, as in the other evenings spent in front of the computer, he had forgotten that he was a human being, and all his stomach had ingested was a miserable cup of coffee.  
"Maybe that's what hurt me," he said to himself as he got up.  
There was no point in turning away and trying to sleep again; he felt that his body would protest strongly the next day if he consumed it in that thoughtless way. Remembering to save some fresh fruit - one of their hostess's gifts - he quickly went to her comfortable kitchen, peeled an apple and sat down in one of the chairs around the round table.  
"I must be careful not to overdo it," he said to himself, as if there were an agenda behind him ready to remind him of his duties as a human being.  
Certainly, with coffee in his body, it was a miracle that he was able to fall asleep; once a friend of his from university, a student at the Faculty of Medicine, had explained to him that what was contained in the bitter liquid had, inside it, elements that were seen by the body as relaxing: in other words, coffee helped to relax the muscles. It was the brain, in that case, to perceive the caffeine and to increase the adrenaline in correspondence of that passage; the tiredness that was felt after some hours was not therefore due to lack of sleep, but rather....  
Ah, who was he kidding? He could also start thinking about the chemical composition of the coffee - which he didn't know anyway - and its physiques wouldn't have changed anyway. His thought, like a nail fixed to a wall, would have gone towards the strange dream he had just finished living.  
"I'm not so... horrible!" he said stubbornly, to calm himself.  
But he knew the truth didn't obey his beliefs. Of course, in the present he was a fairly civilized person to talk to, but he was not only because of a severely received upbringing, as well as the discovery of friendship with his roommates.  
"I'm not alone, I have Yuma and Yuya," he continued, stubbornly.  
But even this was not true. The only thing that had allowed three such different people to be together was that house, and Yusaku, close to graduating, would soon lose the right to own it; it was a lodging that the mistress only gave to university students, and he first didn't want to feel too much in a situation that no longer fit him like a glove.  
On the contrary, when you think about it, he had always been one who was terrified of being in the way: he preferred to distance himself first, rather than questioning his intrusiveness. With such an inclination, he could hardly believe that he would abandon all contact with Sakaki and Tsukumo, and the image of him unhappy sitting in front of a computer, denigrated from afar, became as vivid as it was chilling.  
"I'm making too much trouble for a dream," but even if he made up another thousand and one excuses, he would feel something heavy weighing on him. The trap that would be his ambition.


	3. PRESENT - THE MAN WHO HAD FORGOTTEN FRIENDSHIP

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The hand of the spirit turned to him again. "So, would you like to try?"  
> In that kindness, light-years away from the prying eyes of the tall man who had come earlier to disturb his sleep, Yusaku found the reason to capitulate to his reticence and obey what his imaginary world seemed to ask of him. If he was really dreaming, what could have gone wrong? The worst, at least he said, he'd just been through.  
> When Yusaku grabbed Judai's hand, he was immediately catapulted into a house he knew very well. Too well.
> 
> "This is..."  
> But he didn't stop saying anything that the other one choked his voice with an enthusiastic exclamation.  
> "We're in the Saint Louis Institute, that is..."  
> "My orphanage", the boy concluded for him...

"Good night, Yusaku Fujiki! I have arrived"

He went to sleep with the belief that Yusei's last threat would never materialize. Eventually, dreams may have a plot, but if abruptly interrupted they would remain without an end to remember. So, he would _not_ wake up all frightened by an unknown presence, he thought, there would be no more interruptions to his indispensable sleep.

"Come on, Fujiki, get up! The night is young, and unfortunately I don't have all the time in the world."

Evidently, he was wrong.

"I get it, I'll have to do it the hard way!"

When he found a foreigner, who had come looking for him on his own roof with incomprehensible pretensions, he certainly didn't realize that his colleagues were far worse. If Yusei's greatest perpetrated was an arm taken with cold professionalism, this time the poor student found himself deprived of his beloved blankets and one step away from falling badly on the floor. Squinting his eyes, he decided to frame those who had had the courage to discover him on one of the coldest nights of winter.

Covered almost entirely in a red cape, a friendly-looking young man stared at him amusedly with his brown eyes. Despite those who had gone before him, who had in themselves elements that characterized him as a particular person, unforgettable in his own way, the newcomer had the features of any passer-by, and Yusaku himself wondered whether an eighteen-year-old boy with brown hair had ever appeared in his life.

"I present myself!" he smiled happily - happy with what he was not allowed to know - "My name is Judai Yuki and I am the Spirit of Christmas Present."

At those words, said spirit received in return a slightly surprised and very surprised look.

"Um... Didn't Yusei warn you of my arrival?" he asked, hesitant.

"Sure, but I didn't think he meant it!" Yusaku replied. And he didn't understand if such a performance came from anger at seeing his home being violated or from his tachycardia threatening to crush him with a painful heart attack.

Judai laughed out loud, "You obviously don't know Yusaku! He's incapable of joking, unfortunately!" and put out his hand, "Like you, after all."

Looking at the hand reaching out to him, Yusaku wondered if things would turn out exactly as they did in the previous dream. If he would jump over the houses and beyond the time to get to where others would want to take him.

"You are... the Spirit of Christmas Present, then?" he asked, considering whether dreams could have sequels. And he had to convince himself that this was a dream, because otherwise he would drown his thesis project in the home aquarium and start a ruthless hunt for fairy spirits.

"Exactly, yes. And I'll show you what happens on this very night, outside this room," he continued, looking out the window, "because Christmas can't be called Christmas if you're alone, can it?"

"But I don't want to celebrate Christmas" was his answer.

And it was an answer that came from the heart. He had learned to hate that holiday when he was just a child, when the wickedness of the world had run over him and discovered that there was no one, neither Santa Claus nor God. There was only empiricism, pragmatism and everything to which the world of the rational. It was precisely because of this that, beyond the dreamlike dynamics, he could not accept in any way what was happening to him.

Judai looked away from the window, staring him in the eye again. In the hazelnut-coloured irises, he saw a feeling, a strange light reflected in them, but with his lack of knowledge of human emotion he could in no way identify what it was.

"Don't see this night as torture, then. Christmas may have disappointed you, but he wants to try to make it up to you through us," he said, in a light tone.

"If this were not a dream, I would say that Christmas cannot have a will."

"And since this is a dream, I can tell you that I am the proof that contradicts you," replied the other, winking at him.

The hand of the spirit turned to him again. "So, would you like to try?"

In that kindness, light-years away from the prying eyes of the tall man who had come earlier to disturb his sleep, Yusaku found the reason to capitulate to his reticence and obey what his imaginary world seemed to ask of him. If he was really dreaming, what could have gone wrong? The worst, at least he said, he'd just been through.

When Yusaku grabbed Judai's hand, he was immediately catapulted into a house he knew very well. Too well.

"This is..."

But he didn't stop saying anything that the other one choked his voice with an enthusiastic exclamation.

"We're in the Saint Louis Institute, that is..."

"My orphanage", the boy concluded for him...

The place where he grew up, which he hadn't seen for three long years... If that hadn't been a dream, he would have noticed the great difference between the building in his memories and the one in front of him: the austerity of the past was partly suffocated by the exponential number of plants that, over time, had been placed to fill bleak gray and sad mortals with earth. A hedge that, in springtime, would have known the pleasant scent of gardenias delimited an entrance that had nothing of the rust of the past, the one where Yusaku had almost left our skin for a violent tetanus attack. And then there was the facade, the one that must have aroused fear over the centuries that weighed down on every brick, which spoke of times gone by that Yusaku knew nothing about or remembered nothing. Now there were ivy and creepers, all placed to alternate with the large windows that, in addition to their legendary gable without friezes, now also had nice curtains full of floral decorations.

"If you're wondering," Judai said, intervening in his remarks "... the orphanage you met changed its management the year after your departure. Its new director is a man of about twenty-five years, with little experience on his shoulders but with the firm belief that even orphans have the right to be happy".

"A commendable thought" Yusaku echoed him, and he hid in that ironic comment the smile he had spontaneously painted on his lips.

How much the world could change in just one year. He, who could not smile and could not remember how children socialized, was told to nausea that he would never be adopted, and that without a family to welcome him he would never be happy.

One of the reasons why he wanted a scholarship so badly, besides the more pragmatic desire to form himself and become someone, was the need to escape from such a monster that destroyed childish illusions.

"I wish I'd known him before, this great man," he ran away, as he thought about it.

"Ah, I don't know. I think you're right. Personally, I don't know how it works in an orphanage. This is the first time I've ever visited one."

The boy looked at him surprised.

"What's up? Are you so surprised that the Spirit of Christmas Present had parents?"

"Honestly, yes."

But it didn't go any further, since that was still a dream, and in some dreamlike logic it might actually be normal for ectoplasmic creatures to have a family member or two to refer to.

"They weren't the best one could wish for a boy," Judai was saying in the meantime “but, in their own way, they loved me. Of course, they were very strict... although I can understand them."

"You're the first person I've heard that from," said Yusaku - and he said it because of those thousand young people who couldn't understand the luck they had and were only good at complaining about the thousand restrictions imposed by their relatives.

"Well, I'd be a beast if it weren't the other way around," the other went out laughing. "Besides, only heartless parents wouldn't react to my... mischief."

The student's gaze became suspicious

"Well, not exactly mischief... Let's say I almost set the school on fire once; then there was the time I almost died playing near the volcano on the island and also the time I listened to a stranger and was almost kidnapped, and the time I almost killed a teacher with my..."

Yusaku's mouth would have opened wide, if he hadn't had enough self-control to stifle the sense of frost those words were awakening.

That boy would have deserved to go to jail for something like that!

"Hey, don't look at me like that!" he exclaimed at one point, "Wrong is human, and I'm often wrong."

"I didn't understand, look..."

"What do you think I'm doing here, on Christmas Eve, with a sourpuss like you?"

If Yusaku was more prone to humor, he would have found that parodic situation extremely funny. Perhaps he would have even laughed at the poor wretch, stating the pros and cons of a detention that had evidently been pardoned in community service on inconvenient days of the year.

But if it was a dream, it was one of those lucid ones, where the boy remained intact the faculty of reasoning with reason and caution. And so, hiding all his feelings, he nodded to the structure that still stood before them, the lights turned on as if in a sign of welcome.

"Ah, you're right!" he exclaimed, clapping his hands. "I don't have much time, and I'm throwing it away like this... but come on, let's go in."

And he had expected that, like his colleague before him, he would grab him badly to lead him exactly where he was looking.

Instead, just a few steps ahead of him, the only thing he used his hand for was to incite him to follow him, pointing to the front door.

Yusaku knew that this was just a dream, but he was happy to see so much respect for him. And, above all, such delicacy in leaving the ground beneath his feet.

When Judai Yuki had referred to the change of management, Yusaku had simply decided that the new director, more attentive to the human needs of a bunch of children discarded for various reasons by their families, had adapted an obviously cramped place into a more graceful one in which to lead a miserable childhood.

And instead, contrary to the previous owner's view, the world that presented itself to the boy had the colours of happy children. Trees and enchanted forests had been painted on the wall, some inexperienced hands had covered the foliage with phosphorescent footprints, and all this meant that those were not outcasts, much less abandoned: they were fruits that were ripening, and that people would already find with a smile on their lips.

It was a thought that was ripening in the boy's mind.

"What would my life have been like, if this man had come first?"

"I thank you for your esteem for my powers, but unfortunately I can't go that far."

The boy was surprised to have expressed his thoughts aloud. And also embarrassed

"I'm just saying it," he tried to add, correcting the shot. He didn't know why, but the mere idea of appearing fragile and weak triggered inwardly a mechanism of self-defense, which imposed his inflexibility and indifference as the cornerstones of his main mask on the vision of the people.

And anyway Judai didn't believe him for half a second. Yusaku understood him by the smile he threw at him, a smile he had never seen on the face of those who were in front of him: understanding, and symbolic empathy to share something that he did not want to offer, namely a shoulder to cry on.

"In reality, it was not in that man's ambitions to become what he is now," he said, as if it were something irrelevant, a gossip to be confided when you are in a waiting room, by your doctor "Simply life gave him a signal, and he decided to obey it".

"What signal?" he found himself asking Yusaku, almost against his own will.

"You see... he had a younger sister. Ten years apart if I remember correctly," and he put his index finger on his chin, indicating lucubration he was spending more time on than expected.

"They are not blood brothers," he continued after a while - the time to enter the lobby stairs and get to the first floor, what Yusaku remembered as the conference room (a very sad place where the director gathered all the children together to say what was right and wrong to expect from life, a good way to remind him how deep down they were in the social pyramid) "His father had remarried to her mother, and they had met and become brothers in this way. But, although he was immediately fond of the little one, and she saw that big brother she had wanted since she was born, the fate was not theirs: the parents died in a shipwreck on their honeymoon and... their life changed dramatically. "With the vultures that squandered the fortune, the young man was left with nothing."

"So they both ended up in an orphanage?" Yusaku didn't even try to appear unselfish anymore.

"Unfortunately, he was already of age, and without a penny, a house, a job, or a relative to take care of her, the child was taken by social services, and only she ended up in an orphanage. That's just so we understand each other."

At that hint, the boy tried to keep a local mind to remember a little girl with such a sad past. An effort that lasted less than two seconds, because he was immediately struck by the awareness that even having met her, his past terror of his neighbor, which then evolved into misanthropy, would not allow him to create bonds stable enough to grant him strong memories.

She only had one conclusion to make: "It must have been hell for her then."

Judai nodded, "This place is man's revenge on a destiny that robbed him of the only person he had left. Since he couldn't have her, he did everything he could to be close to her in every other way."

He smiled, the student, at the thought of such brotherly love and the trials they had had to go through.

Judai, meanwhile, had mentioned the young man who, by virtue of his ghostly role, had consequently given Yusaku his own imperceptibility. "You don't know the beauty of going through walls," he commented, when he walked back and forth between the closed doors, almost as if to highlight a sense of omnipotence that other ghosts might never have expressed. Avoiding thinking about it - and asking questions, because by now he had understood that Judai had the unpleasant habit of dwelling on the disparate things he knew - he followed his example and, immediately, realized the beneficial effects of the new director.

The conference room was now a very large dining room, coloured in pastel shades of yellow and orange. The greyness of evil had been replaced by the sunshine of childhood, underlined by those who seriously desired the good of their protégés.

But Yusaku did not pay attention to the world around him, to the inviting food that spread through the large room inviting smells that clashed between them.

No, he looked at the adoring children who surrounded a figure dressed roughly in red, badly imitating the claudicating gait of the old Santa Claus.

He knew that Santa Claus. He'd only spent two years of his life with him, but he knew him really well.

Homura Takeru's clumsy attempts at aging went no further than the cheap choice of a white wig and a beard, yellowed for use and neglect. He himself smoothed it with his free hand, in a well-established play that, mentally, he accompanied with small ritual gestures.

He had changed enormously what he remembered as a sad child, unable to accept the death of his parents and bewildered in the adult world, dominated by laws that had prevented him from returning home because authoritative people had decreed that only after numerous checks would his grandparents be worthy to receive him in their lives.

Controls that had gone on for a good two years.

Takeru looked tall and thin, although the costume made an effort to evoke a different tonicity; he must have used a pillow to make his belly look swollen and disproportionate, and the only result he had achieved was to make people laugh with that jarring element on a dry and thin physique.

Homura Takeru, who did nothing but cry.

Homura Takero, who was always angry at grown-ups.

Homura Takeru, who was gradually losing hope for a better future.

That same child who had snatched their friendship from him, like a game he was tired of, now stood in the middle of a sea of kids and laughed at the ludicrous he knew how to create for himself.

He had recognized him right away, but he had to confess that, at the same time, he found it hard to admit that it was him.

"Come on, now, how can you tell me you hate Christmas with all this atmosphere?!"

Judai had opened his arms wide because he found it unnecessary to mention only the children, or just the Christmas tree, or the little packages that everyone was holding in their hands, or the sack that Takeru generously distributed them with. It was all the beautiful things that made Christmas worth living, and Yusaku, if that hadn't been a dream, would have said that the only out-of-tune note in that painting was not being part of the collective hilarity.

But it was a dream, and in that dream he did not go beyond the disturbing semblance of the voyeurs, of those who demand the everyday life of others without legitimate permission.

It was perhaps for this reason that he didn't give the spirit of an answer, limiting himself to approaching that boy so similar and so distant to what he had been - or what could have been - his first and true friend.

He had left, while Judai's ramblings were going on, and while the latter had taken to exalting himself for every sign left by the Christmas, Takeru had taken leave of his role as Santa Claus to get closer to a man who, until then, Yusaku hadn't noticed

"Thank you for what you did, Homura-kun" he was saying, and Fujiki could barely hear them because of the noise the children were making "You didn't have to do that, yet..."

"You know it's a pleasure for me" interrupted the other one "It makes me feel good. And to entertain the children, I think, is the best thing adults can do."

_You've changed your mind from about ten years ago_ , he would have wanted to tell Yusaku, who remembered him in a very different philosophy.

"Rather," he continued, ignorant of who was next to him at that moment. "Did you happen to get in touch with him? Have you heard anything from him?"

He hadn't mentioned any names, but it seemed unnecessary. At least, not for the new director.

"I'm sorry, but I still haven't heard anything from my sources. "The only thing I know for sure is that he started attending one of Miami's universities, although I don't know which one."

"I imagined it," said Takeru, with a sad smile. "Besides, he's always been like that."

"I'm sorry," repeated the strutting man by his side. "You're helping me so much, and I can't even do something that simple for you."

"If it's Yusaku Fujiki you're talking about, then I'm pretty sure it can't be that simple."

And Yusaku was stunned, realizing that the two were talking about him

"I must confess, however, that I am afraid," he admitted, after a few seconds of silence, interspersed with the laughter of the children. "I'm afraid I won't be able to find him. I'm afraid of letting too much time go by... and what will he have of me? What memory will he have of me?"

_The memory of a child who, in order not to suffer, chose to make others suffer._

A cruel and even worse thought, in the perspective that, for who knows what hidden reason, that boy who had shattered all his hopes of friendship, as well as his confidence in building new ones, now showed repentance and even the desire to see him again.

He would not have admitted it, Yusaku, not even in that place that was only dreamlike, but he would have wanted to know the thought that had triggered such a change in Takeru.

But he wasn't satisfied, of course. After a brief nod of understanding, the boy went back to being St. Nicholas and, with a smile at the children, said he had to return to his sleigh, in the sky, to give the other good children the gifts waiting in the huge bags next to the reindeer.

"Can we go?" Judai asked, with a strange light in his eyes.

He did not doubt for a second, the student, that this boy had heard and seen everything. Even his innermost mental anxieties.

He nodded, and anticipated it by extending the hand with which he would allow the usual magic to take place.

***

A slight tugging and he found himself back in his room, in the middle of his cramped little room.

Judai had left him alone, and had to confess that he was sorry. Even Yusei had been entertaining him, helping him come to terms with that pantomime of the future that he did not consider worthy of living.

He wanted reassurance.

He would have wanted consolations.

Although that was a dream, Yusaku felt the need to hear that it was all true. And that everything would be all right.

So, in the irony that characterized that Christmas, there was also the need to be a child, a trembling child who had to be led by the hand into the meanders where he was in danger of getting lost. In his case, they were those of thought.

He didn't know, Yusaku Fujiki, how to define that night. He didn't lack the synonyms of the word _strange_ , but in that strange Yusaku didn't come to terms with whether to find good or evil.

Especially for that particular present, he didn't know how to take Homura Takeru's sudden repentance.

"What was the fight about?"

He jumped into bed, the student, before realizing it was just Judai. He thought he was alone, and instead that boy was just poking around in his kitchen. Looking for something to scrounge, probably - he deduced it from the slow movement of his jaw, still tasting the crumbs of what had been stolen.

Ignoring the heartbeat for that scare, he decided that the best thing was to answer the question.

"I don't even ask how you know this... but we didn't fight. Not in the true sense of the word."

"Is there any other way to understand an argument?" asked the evidently dubious chestnut.

"How can I tell you... There was never that moment when our anger was unleashed. We didn't blame ourselves for our mistakes. We never yelled at each other, saying what we were thinking at that moment."

And maybe that's why their bond had deteriorated so much over time.

Being with Yuya and Yuma, Yusaku soon realized what really fuels friendship. What he was less accustomed to, absurdly enough, was the _word_.

Obviously, feeling was of primary importance, and gestures served to make it explicit in a sincere way, but it was words that explained a thought, clarified a misunderstanding, and expressed disappointment. To remain silent only meant to accumulate resentment, and in accumulating it, all that was gained was hatred.

The gestures of affection, the availability of friendship, diminished, and in short even a great closeness became nothing but ashes.

That's what he and Takeru had experienced.

"We met when I was about seven years old," he explained. "We both came from the same situation, and we were facing it without an adult who had the right explanation for our sadness.

No parents, no home, no identity. For two years, Yusaku Fujiki had seriously believed that he had found the only person who didn't look for something broken, something bad in him. That he saw him simply as a silent child, and not as a mentally ill person suffering from elective mutism.

"When the psychologists at the institute began to see signs of improvement in me, they immediately attributed the cause to my closeness to Homura. They were right, I guess. He was... the one who saw the worst of me, and yet remained by my side."

"I understand, you know?" Judai said, with a smile of understanding on his boyish face. "I've known people like that too, who made me forget all the trouble I've been in."

In the future, those same psychologists, who had made such favorable predictions about his recovery, were disappointed to discover that everything had been undone in the days following the removal of his friend.

"He still had a family to go back to," Yusaku continued his story. "His grandparents had struggled with social workers for two years, but they finally succeeded, and the court deemed them fit to take care of him.

It was a simple heart disease that complicated something incredibly simple. A sickness that aggravated old Homura's health, and that could have killed him at the least predictable moment. Something so close to a trauma that it made it difficult to reconnect with their only grandchild.

It was at that point that he painted an expression of dismay on the ghost's face.

"You're angry with him... because did he leave? Because did he leave you behind?"

There was disappointment in his gaze, as if his greed devalued him in his eyes.

"I'd be lying to you if I said I wasn't jealous, or jealous of him for a real home, a real bed, a real family to come home to. All the orphans want this, and I would have sold my soul to have his place even for a minute. But to hate him for it... Who do you think I am?"

The accusation was so serious that it deserved his bewilderment and his anger. It meant downgrading him to the rank of an inept man who doesn't know what to expect out of life.

"That's not what ruined our relationship. We just started to feel less and less, until it stopped altogether. If you're talking about being left behind... yes, in this case that's exactly how I felt."

A simple parenthesis of a sad childhood, a trivial way to deceive the time he spent without his family. For years - until just before that dream - Yusaku had always considered this to be Takeru's thought, because when things started to get worse, when the mutism worsened as the first signs of stuttering surfaced, fortunately disappeared over time, when the worst symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome had begun to bite his soul... he simply hadn't been there. And it wasn't enough to repeat that it was normal, that he had a life to think about, that he couldn't devote every moment of the day to him, that they had nothing in common except the triggering event of every ruin; he had suffered from that silence, and continued to suffer to the point of discrediting friendship as a mere tinsel for happy people.

Because there was no excuse for the missed answers, missed appointments, missed visits he had suffered for too many years. He had stopped looking for him the day he went to his house thanks to a special permission he had worked so hard to obtain, and he had heard that he was not there, and instead he had heard him laughing out loud from his room, located not high enough.

"I'm sure there's something right to tell you right now... but unfortunately, as good as I am at talking, I suck at situations like this."

And he scratched the back of his head, Judai, almost embarrassed by his deciphering. Yusaku let a smile run through, which was almost mistaken for a grimace.

"I'm certainly not in a position to criticize you, Judai-san."

And no other words came, the embarrassment broken only by the ticking of a clock lost in the house.

"I'd say my work here is done," said the ghost, heading towards the window. "And though I needn't tell you... don't sigh with relief, for the Ghost of Christmas Past is yet to come."


	4. PAST - THE MAN WHO HAD FORGOTTEN THE PAIN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yusaku hadn't cried for 15 years.  
> He had done it all the time during his confinement, but afterwards he had completely stopped letting his negative emotions flow through his tears. Some doctors said that he had stopped being empathetic - even though he didn't even know what it meant at the time - others that he had decided to lock his heart in an armor of neutrality and indifference.  
> Instead, he had simply decided to forcefully erase those memories from his mind. He would stop feeling pain, betrayal, anger, and hatred, and it didn't matter if erasing those feelings would erase everything else.  
> But on that night Yusaku had become a child again, and he was the child who had not yet taken a vow of penance for all his emotions. He was the child who still wondered what he had done wrong, who apologized to God and promised to be good, who wanted to feel someone, any someone just to be aware that he was not alone. Or worse, not to be alone with God.

He opened his eyes wide, Yusaku, unaware whether that was still a dream or the real world.

He had had enough of those false awakenings, lived too long in that night that was certainly marking his psyche. If he had been able to speak with due honesty towards Judai, he would have pointed out to him that he had certainly better understood himself from those hallucinogenic visions, that he would have learned to behave more humanely and more civilly and that he could also go to sleep because the next day he absolutely had to complete the computer project he had in progress.

"Are you so afraid of me?" said a voice...

But of course, he couldn't be satisfied. And evidently, he was in yet another dream, since, not far from his bed, a funny little boy with a shy smile and an ephebic face gave him a slight wave with his hand.

"I mean ..." he added, in a light voice, "I'm not saying that you should be afraid of me" and pointed to himself, as if to emphasize that someone like him, thin as a twig and thin to frighten, did not have the strength to hurt even a kitten "... but of what I represent".

Yusaku did not respond to that provocation. Why else would he say he was right. Damn right.

"The past is what he says it is; the past. I don't understand its usefulness."

It was his desperate attempt to cast him out - and if that ghost had had more virile and less empathic features, or if he had been more cruel, he would have cast him out with the threat of an exorcism in the light of a non-existent moon.

"The past defines us, is what makes us who we are. Without a past, we have no future. In your case, without a past, you have a questionable future," then, on second thought, "I mean, it's not like I'm saying you're a bad person, but..."

"I will be," Yusaku cut short, in an ill-concealed attempt to conceal his anxiety. "And since I've been warned about this threat, you may as well go torment someone else."

The ghost didn't answer. All he did was reach out his right hand.

"I am Yugi Muto, the Ghost of Christmas Past. And my task tonight is to show you what has made this holiday something terrible and dreadful."

"A good way to ruin my night? A good way to ruin my life!?" Yusaku shouted, frightened even himself.

Yusaku did not scream; Yusaku was always master of himself.

But not at that time, not in the face of the threat that had become explicit. Not in front of that proposal that seemed to have no power to refuse.

"Leave me alone, please..." a growl that was also a plea, a concentrate of emotions that the student's own heart refused to analyze.

But Yugi did not give up.

"Believe me, it's the last thing I want, to hurt you. And under normal circumstances I would try to ease your pain by showing you something that can't hurt you. But you need to see it."

"What?!" Yusaku shouted.

"What you're running away from. Your perpetual nightmare."

What had given him that annoying mutism; claustrophobia; sleepless nights; fear of others.

The hand was still before him, waiting to be grasped.

"You will not be alone in that night. I will be there with you."

He didn't know why, but those words had the power to appease his fury, to dominate his ego, which was now out of tune. The hand became less threatening, Yugi less annoying.

"Don't I really have a choice?" he asked, in one last attempt.

"No, if you want to go on in a different way from what you saw"

And perhaps it was the figure of a man who had forgotten how to smile, perhaps it was the idea that yet another escape from those shadows began to disgust him.

He took the boy's hand, hating himself for making such a fuss before accepting it and hating himself for not being able to refuse it.

Yusaku Fujiki hadn't been in the woods since he was eight years old. When he was ten, the children of the orphanage had had the exceptional opportunity to visit a pine forest, but he was the only one who did not join in their joy. When he arrived there, he was so violently panicked that his teachers were forced to send him to the emergency room.

The motivation was right in front of his eyes.

He was not afraid of the forests, or the sparse bushes, or the soft earth. He was not afraid of dry, bare trees, what in the light of the stars look like the decomposed limbs of a human being.

No, he was afraid of the woods because, every time he went into them, he always found yet another illusion.

"We have arrived."

But he didn't let go of Yugi's hand. And Yugi understood.

The six houses that stood before them had nothing suspicious; they were harmless buildings of steel rising from the earth, which had no windows and were too small to be inhabited.

Yet there hid the deepest horror, the horror that had marked Yusaku all his life.

"Shall we go?" was Yugi's question. "Remember, this time I won't let you go"

And, in confirmation of that promise, the handshake became stronger, more unbreakable.

He would have wanted to thank him, for that, he would have wanted to affirm how important the awareness of not being alone was - or perhaps he would have shouted, Yusaku, because in the end his heart was bleeding only from the obstinacy of that ghost.

But he didn't do any of that. He didn't have the power, because his mouth seemed to have lost every drop of saliva. And perhaps he had also lost his blood, because the sudden cold that he felt made him believe that he had frost in his veins.

"Courage," said the boy again, pushing him into the nerve centre of his hell.

Yusaku found himself inside before he even realized he had walked.

There was nothing in that room. There were no games, no TV, no posters. There wasn't even a bed, or a pillow, or a stuffed animal. There was a blanket, but it was worn and faded, so that the original color was now completely undefinable.

And yet that was a baby's room.

He stood in the middle of the room, his face marked with tears. His hands and feet were flayed by chains, tinkling as the little one began to move slightly on the chair in which he was forced to spend every single minute of his day. Numerous IVs attached to his arm prevented him from dying of hardship, but also prevented him from sleeping, remembering and remaining lucid. Attached to his temples, numerous electrodes charged with static energy.

On the eyes, a veil of sadness, of loneliness. And the knowledge that in that cold Christmas Santa Claus would never come to visit.

Yusaku fell chunks to the ground, approaching that child. He felt the stinging pain in his arm - he found there the scars he was always forced to hide to avoid misunderstandings - the pain in his head caused by electric shocks, the stinging hunger, the burning eyes.

And his heart exploded in his chest, lost its blood and stopped beating. He even forgot to breathe.

"Yusaku! I'm right next to you," said Yugi. But his voice was already covered in tears, the empathy to play the sad role of an emotional spectator.

Yusaku was not a spectator. He was watching, but in that watching he lived all that he had lived, all the torment of a child who forgot hope and happiness. He was lost in those green irises that had nothing left, not even life, and he lost life too, because he didn't want to leave but he didn't want to suffer anymore.

He had stayed there for six months, but he would never have been able to say exactly that. Time had expanded, without a star to define it, and for him those endless hours had become an eternity, an agony that should never end.

And in his mind he wondered why all this was happening to him, what he had done so badly that he deserved such punishment. He wondered if it was because a few days ago, or who knows how long ago, he had stolen a nice pen from the director's study. He wondered if God had punished him for that crime, and if it was a warning never to cheat again in his life. Or perhaps he punished him for the time when he had sneaked into the study where the teachers were preparing their lessons, and had been fiddling with the computer until dawn caught him asleep on the keyboard.

The priest told him every Sunday, moreover, that every evil act had to be punished, that God did not want bad children with him, that when they behaved badly he would send them straight to hell. And he also said that the children destined for the orphanage were surely the most wicked, because they didn't have a mother and father to love them, so they must have been so bad that even they couldn't bear his existence.

So maybe God had punished him because he was bad. Or maybe because he was going to be one.

But if God punished him for something he had not yet done, why did the priest say that God was good and merciful? Did He want him to be an orphan?

At the thought of it, Yusaku even stopped praying. Because if God had chosen that punishment, then he would almost certainly not have come to save him.

"That's enough!"

The child became foggy, and finally disappeared.

***

Yusaku hadn't cried for 15 years.

He had done it all the time during his confinement, but afterwards he had completely stopped letting his negative emotions flow through his tears. Some doctors said that he had stopped being empathetic - even though he didn't even know what it meant at the time - others that he had decided to lock his heart in an armor of neutrality and indifference.

Instead, he had simply decided to forcefully erase those memories from his mind. He would stop feeling pain, betrayal, anger, and hatred, and it didn't matter if erasing those feelings would erase everything else.

But on that night Yusaku had become a child again, and he was the child who had not yet taken a vow of penance for all his emotions. He was the child who still wondered what he had done wrong, who apologized to God and promised to be good, who wanted to feel someone, any someone just to be aware that he was not alone. Or worse, not to be alone with God.

Yusaku cried that night. For himself, for what he'd suffered, for what he'd never recovered from. He cried because no one had had a shred of humanity for a seven-year-old boy abandoned to himself, among sufferings that would have killed even an adult. He cried because the evil had once again dug into his mind, into his heart, burned the logic to which he had devoted himself and destroyed everything that had a semblance of happiness.

Yusaku wept for all that he had kept for fifteen years, because the magic of that night had allowed him to face what, in the back of his mind, he had always tried to deny: violence, evil, unhappiness. It had been like remembering to be human, _to have been human,_ and to have fallen badly to the ground, without any hand to help him get up.

Yusaku, that night, rediscovered pain. He rediscovered those emotions he'd long forgotten.

"I'm sorry"

He did not need to open his eyes or move the palms in which he hid his moans, to understand that at his side, sitting on his wretched bed, was the same ghost who had reopened the biggest wound hidden in his heart.

And he wasn't the only one crying that night. The ghost's amethyst eyes hid, in the redness, the reflected pain he had suffered from such an inglorious memory.

"You say it as if it were you who had locked me in there," his voice was a whisper, his throat had become hoarse after the mask had dissolved.

"No, but... it's as if I did it now."

It was only at that juncture that the student noticed, with great consternation, that the two of them were not alone. The golden cloak hid yet another ghost of that damned evening, and though his features were almost identical to those of the one he had at a short distance, the boy also identified a more inflexible, more proud, more noble temper. The similarities stopped at mere appearance.

"Yusaku, you needed to see for yourself," said the stranger.

"Atem!" exclaimed Yugi, dismayed. "What are you doing here?"

"I finished early," he said, with simplicity. Then, noticing the surprised look of the young man, "Yes, I am a Spirit too. One of the spirits of Christmas Past."

"Are there more?" was Yusaku's silly question.

"Sure, otherwise we'd die a second time, given all the work we have to do this day of the year."

And he sat down, too, not far from what looked like his twin.

"Tell me Yusaku" began. "Why do you think that was necessary?"

_You should tell me_ , it would have been the boy's instinctive response, but he kept it to himself. Part of him, he didn't know which part of him, had seen in that question a point of reflection that he had always refused to ask himself.

He hadn't forgotten. It was foolish to say so, and it was foolish not to take into account the many repercussions he had suffered on that unhappy Christmas night - and the following ones that covered the inauspicious span of six long months.

Like Homura, like four other children, he had not returned home that night, and had suffered the pains of hell because of a group of researchers who, forced by medical ethics not to use conventional human guinea pigs, had thought of resorting to extreme means for results that had finally proved inglorious.

"I never came back from that place" and that was the first time he admitted it.

He wouldn't go on. He simply survived, even he didn't know why it was absurd.

"The reason I went into computer science was to seek revenge. I wanted to make them pay back, the people who had done everything to me... all that" because Yusaku didn't know what word to assign to the numerous series of tortures he had endured "And when I was one step away from achieving my goal... I simply couldn't do anything."

"Why?" Yugi asked.

"Because the director who started the project was dead."

He didn't believe it at first. Two years spent collecting information, his first experiences of hacking devolved to his only goal in life. All just to read a sad death certificate.

"He'd committed suicide, the bastard. Couldn't survive the guilt and shot himself in the head."

He would have wanted to hold the revolver that had cooled him down. He would have wanted to be there, in front of him, the seconds it was firing. He would have liked to see his face twisted with despair as he was accountable to him for his sins.

"He had not paid for his crimes," continued the boy, his hands clutched in the silk cloth of the sheets. "His lawyers had cleared him of all charges, and they had covered up the case so well that not even the press knew about it. There was only us, with the skeleton of our past raging on the present. And that man allowed himself to commit suicide, as if he was the victim."

Unable to stand still, unable to stand a bed that was slowly becoming a cage, Yusaku got up with angry jerks, his bare feet sinking into the icy stone of the floor.

"And then, Yusaku? After that, what did you do?"

After that?

Yusaku hadn't done anything. He had taken what little he had left of his life and started to build an anonymous, insipid pantomime, something that wouldn't allow him to stop and reflect on the monster behind him.

"What was I supposed to do? Take my own life too, perhaps?" he shouted.

The anger exploded again, with the scream of pure hate to be lost in a night consumed by memories. The alarm clock that was to wake him the next day exploded, and the many books he was building his thesis on - his future - fell.

His mask also fell, and the features of a destroyed man came out, a man who had nothing left and didn't even know where to look for something precious, something worth living for.

"Yusaku, you're making a mistake."

Yugi was the one who spoke, he got up too.

"We... I did something horrible to you. "I forced you to relive something that destroyed you, that changed you... no, that gave you no choice but to change."

"Yugi..." tried to stop him Atem, who didn't think an apology was necessary for something they hadn't done.

But the ghost wouldn't let him continue.

"But there's a reason why we did it," and with a sigh - which almost seemed like encouragement to himself - he added, "Do you know why you'll stop smiling, after twenty years?"

Yusaku did not answer. He had no idea what to say.

"Because now you still have hope of success, to carry on. Once you've achieved it, you'll have no goals left to achieve. Do you know what happened on Christmas Day - the next day, to that man?"

He could tell from Yugi's sad look, from Atem's sad look.

"He shot himself in the head with a revolver."

The two nodded.

The same end as the man who had killed him at the age of six; in the future, Yusaku would know the irony better, it seemed.

"That event destroyed you, Yusaku," whispered the little “'I understand' or 'I can understand'. It takes a lot of trauma to really understand what you've been through."

The astonished look the student gave him was because of an event that, in his eyes, was extraordinary.

Someone who did not take his suffering for granted, who did not try to understand it. Someone who simply accepted them.

"I wish I could just say 'Go on, don't stop' or 'Don't look back, just to the future'. But that would be too little."

"Yusaku, life is a challenge," added Atem, as he eager to help his twin. "And with you it was more inclement, burdening you with a burden that a normal person can't bear."

"But you're alive, my friend," Yugi concluded. "You're alive, you're young, and you're also a computer genius extraordinaire."

"And you are not alone"

A voice behind him, which Yusaku did not fail to recognize in the cold tones of Yusei Fudo.

The ghost of Future Christmas and Present Christmas were behind him, the former with his usual tough-guy air, the latter with a cheerful smile on his face.

"You have friends who won't abandon you if you let them stay by your side," said the Moor again. "People who will understand better than us, better than anyone..."

"Better than psychologists, I'd say" Judai helped him.

"Yes, even better than psychologists... I mean, they'll help you as no one ever will."

"Two people you already know," added the chestnut. "And another one I introduced you to."

"Until the very last moment, Yusaku, we told you about this night like this is a dream," said Yugi.

"But don't think of it as just a dreamlike parenthesis. Think of it as the right opportunity to start from scratch," was Atem's comment.

It was the latter who approached him, a note suddenly appeared in his hands. Handing it over without saying a word, he disappeared silently, followed little Yugi.

The last thing Yusaku saw was his room suddenly becoming empty.

***

He woke up, and by instinct Yusaku knew that this would be the last time.

With a smile, he realized he was holding something in his hands. Something subtle and fragile.


	5. 25 DECEMBER - THE MAN WHO REMEMBER CHRISTMAS

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What was important, then, was to have a destination, and a chance to get there on time. It wasn't Christmas yet, those horrible twenty years hadn't passed.  
> And he hadn't given up hope yet.

The bed he had in his grandparents' house was of a solidity that was second only to bricks, so much so that he had never understood how you could call an orthopedic mattress a mattress that destroyed your back, instead of correcting its posture. It was for this reason that the first sign with which he deduced that he was elsewhere, not in his home and not in his room, was the relief of joints that, at least for that day, had not rested roughly on a palette that cracked the relief of rest - and to him the good mood.

Homura Takeru smiled joyfully on that Christmas morning. It was the first thing he did, and the best thing that came to him.

On the chair not far away, the Santa Claus costume he had rented covered the entire backrest in plain wood, poorly concealing the padding that had done a very poor job, as the mirror had suggested. However, he would not complain about it, at least not when the laughter of his children was still ringing in his ears.

Takeru stopped smiling. Because he loved those children, but there wasn't the only one among them who really wanted to make them happy.

He wouldn't confess this to anyone, much less to the person concerned, but there was a time when he had become a selfish person. The presence of the jade-eyed boy had become more of a complaint than a reason for amusement; to cross him even by mistake meant going back a little further, to those memories that he insisted on forgetting - or at least pretending that they had had no side effect on him.

It wasn't a mistake just because, at the end of the day, he was deliberately cutting a bond with a shear that couldn't survive, after so many NO, but above all because those scissors he was handling were made up of boys ready to do anything for a moment of true happiness. Even cheating with the world, with themselves and their families.

It was they who had introduced him to the intoxication of drugs, the pleasures of alcohol, the quiet of a cigarette. He soon became addicted to it, in a shamelessness that even those two elderly spouses who had agreed to take care of him, because he represented all that was left of their beloved son. He would take money secretly, steal it when he had the availability and borrow it when the necessary need for a new dose put his dignity aside.

He could not remember what a child he had been, but he was certainly becoming a bad adult.

Everything changed on the day when Providence, tired of his constant mistakes, decided to punish him by taking away all that was left of his family - his grandparents died on a cold early winter night, probably killed by what must have been his long-time friend, encouraged by his hatred for committing a capital crime.

That was the beginning of Homura Takeru's change: he could slide down even lower, become an abominable human being and shift all responsibility for the lost accident, convinced that, with all he had suffered, he had no chance of a normal life.

Instead, he had chosen the hardest, most complex path: to fight against his demons, old and new, and go back to being a Takeru of which his grandparents would have been proud.

"Takeru, are you ready?" said a female voice, knocking lightly.

Aoi Zaizen was far too shy and far too demure to enter a boy's room, even if she had received permission or an invitation, but she was diligent enough to encourage him to come with her to breakfast. With her older brother, with all the children in the school, the teachers and the various orderlies.

"Not yet," replied the boy honestly, who in fact hadn't even moved from his comfortable bed. "Give me five minutes and I'll be down."

***

Akira greeted him with those rare smiles of kindness when he crossed the great arch that introduced him to the Great Hall, as he had renamed it when he had glimpsed the large tables, hosting a large number of inviting food. In his impeccable suit, identical to his previous ones and not even slightly dissonant even though Christmas had its requirements, he came to him with his hand outstretched as a sign of greeting.

"I managed to escape the children who want to put a fake beard on me - your fake beard, the one you left on the chair last night."

"Ops" admitted the other, guilty "I confess I couldn't take it anymore; my face was itching. In fact, I couldn't remember where I put it."

"Now you'll know it's in the wrong hands, then."

And they both laughed, happy to see the children's fantasies flirting with the adults.

"Merry Christmas, Akira," said the young man, with a smile.

"Merry Christmas to you too" was the answer he received.

And then came the children - and poor bearded-faced Aoi - to invoke the same wish and receive it in hugs that communicated affection, love and closeness.

***

They were about to get ready for the table, the stomach that demanded the due compensation for such happiness, when suddenly a man came to them. Takeru recognized him as the porter of the structure, a certain Kitamura who, in terms of beauty, left something to be desired.

"Sorry to disturb you, but... well, a visitor has arrived" was his message, his hands clasped together, his face slightly distraught. His voice was faint, so only Akira, he and Aoi were lucky enough to hear it.

"Send him away, then. Today is Christmas, I'll have the right to enjoy it without working," was the director's abrupt reply - perhaps fearing that it was some zealous supplier coming to collect who knows what debt.

"But it's not... I mean, he came here to visit the children," he said then, in a slightly worried voice. Kitamura, Homura recalled, had the unpleasant habit of not knowing how to handle situations, even simple ones. He was only good at obeying.

"Did he at least tell you who he is, sorry?"

"Ah, yes!" exclaimed the man "His name is Yusaku Fujiki."

***

Yusaku felt the lack of a restful sleep - he missed his bed, the sheets that kept him warm, the silence of his room, the awareness that all he needed to do was open a window and no longer be totally locked in a corner of the world that could become his grave.

He had had to do psychological violence on himself to drag himself onto a shaky airplane, with small portholes and even smaller compartments, small chairs and small tables, to serve small lunches that the stomach of the dissidents, therefore his own, would never digest at such a high altitude.

A tiny little room, therefore, with no way out, where his claustophobia had enjoyed poking at him all the time, and where even the sleeping pill had had to give in, becoming a mild sedative to soothe his furious panic attacks.

When, upon his last awakening, he found himself holding a one-way ticket to Den City, Yusaku laughed - perhaps the first real laugh since those sad fifteen years. He had found it an utterly oddity, or at least overly tangible evidence for ghosts who had no historical or theoretical volume to testify to their existence.

Perhaps for the first time in his life, however, the haker had not asked himself any questions. He had decided to take what life offered him and enjoy its positive pleasures. On the other hand, for years he had searched for explanations for every thousandth detail of his life, and the result had been a useless waste of meningitis and the foreboding of unpleasant wrinkles that would, over the years, ruin his distressed face.

What was important, then, was to have a destination, and a chance to get there on time. It wasn't Christmas yet, those horrible twenty years hadn't passed.

And he hadn't given up hope yet.

But he would have been a liar if he had hidden the anxiety that devoured his chest when he got out of the flying banger, the past doubts that surfaced in the present as he travelled along known but changed paths in time, towards what he once called home.

Accepting it was easy, a little less so was forgiving. The institute that had made him feel guilty for being born, the city that had never given him back his parents, Takeru who had abandoned him to himself.

For a moment, he even considered leaving, or maybe getting another ticket to Yuma in Heartland, or else Yuya to his parents. It would have been a beautiful Christmas anyway, and he would have enjoyed himself - he would put his miserable existence aside for a moment.

But then he realized it.

He was meditating again on how to escape.

And he didn't want to do it, he didn't want to give credence to that voice that made him act like a coward.

On the other hand, although he wasn't expected, wasn't it Takeru himself who asked for him?

If forgiving wasn't easy, if setting aside the past was difficult, then why not simply build new memories, perhaps happy ones, in the future?

Why not cover the future with new promises?

The positive answer came to him in an embrace. The one in which Takeru welcomed him, the one in which he was lost and the one that tasted like tears but also smiles.

"I'm sorry" was about to say Takeru, and Yusaku sensed it.

But he prevented it.

"Merry Christmas," he said, and realized that this was the first time in fifteen years that he had given such a wish.

"Merry Christmas," Takeru replied, sobbing, "Don't... I don't know why you're here, but just know that... "I'm happy about it, and I'm sorry about..."

"Let's not talk about it now," Yusaku interrupted him again, with a smile.

A smile that said, "Yes, I want to forgive. I want to forgive you."

Takeru, who had stopped believing in God long ago, found himself unconsciously thanking him.

"Know that I'm so happy to have you here today!" and, pulling him back, added, "Come, I want you to meet someone."

Behind him, Akira and Aoi first, and the children behind them, with a smile, waited to welcome him into their alcove of love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you very much for coming this far. I hope you enjoyed this story, and I also want to apologize if some points may have been ... bad to read. This is not my first story, but it's my first story in English, so I don't know if the work that came out of it is good or bad. Google translate and deepl have helped me a lot, but they can't have solved all the problems XD so I hope there are few of them.  
> Thanks again for following me. I wish you many, many wishes for a Merry Christmas, and may these holidays be special, even if the situation this year is very complicated. 
> 
> Merry Christmas
> 
> Lenoir


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